Publications

Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality. Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production.

Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.

Thanks to Jean Pierre Cueto, who is forever in our thoughts and who invited us to apply, and to Nicole de Fleurs of Zaglossus.

Curating as Anti-Racist Practice, 2017
Natalie Bayer, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Nora Sternfeld, editors
Published in German by De Gruyter / Die Angewandte
Published in English by Aalto University

The anthology Curating as Anti-Racist Practice reflects upon museums and exhibitions from the perspective of postcolonial museology, and critical migration and regime research. Beyond critical analysis, this collection of texts is about collecting strategies and forms of action that make it possible to think of curating as anti-racist practice. Using as springboards the intersections between social battlefields and curatorial practices, as well as a focus on agency, this book examines the relationality of struggles for and against representation. Therefore, the focus is on discursive strategies of resistance, contact zones and approaches to re-appropriation.

The invited artists share a deep preoccupation with the intersection of political, sexual, ecological and spiritual realms. Their works push the association between third-world, racialized, gendered bodies and colonial history, political activism and ancestral references, sexual politics and mystical sources.
The works invoke an stitching of wounds, of moving selves, of spiritual activisms. They refer to cosmovisions of interrelation, of trans and afro spiritualities, of andean transformations, and indigenous reparations. They braid connections: caring for the dead in underworld journeys, exorcising whiteness with poisonous cures, and channeling communal spirits. They seek to activate ancestral knowledge and universal energies: a politics of the ritual towards healing revolutions.
The works are connected between each other by the invocations they summon. In curating this printed issue we have approached the artistic and theoretical reflections of two figures: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and the Chicana author and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, her job as an artist “is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal) and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its vision.” In tune, for Mendieta, art’s greatest value is its spiritual role: “my art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

Thanks to section.a for the invitation. Thanks to Verena Melgarejo Weinandt who invited me to co-curate, and to < rotor > association for contemporary art who linked us to Parabol. Thanks to the suggestions of Miguel López and Arturo Higa, and to the work of Manuel Carreon Lopez of kunst-dokumentation.com.

Thanks to Katarzyna Winiecka and Katherine Ball who asked me to take part.

Bleibeführer_in Wien
Guide for refugees and asylum seekers who stay to live in Vienna, 2012. Initiated by Erinmwionghae Clifford and Hansel Sato in cooperation with Planet 10 in the frame of Wienwoche.

A guide to make visible the network of support towards migrants and asylum seekers and to encourage resistance by gathering local, political, and cultural spaces, as well as testimonies on how to deal with social workers, police harassment or any other forms of institutionalized racism. Places where to sleep, legal and asylum support, governmental institutions, antiracist work organizations, counseling for women, queer spaces, healthcare centers for migrants, options for mobility, education, children, culture, and spaces for political organization. First edition: 1000 copies. Second edition: 1500 copies. The guide can be downloaded here and a search by districts can be made here. http://bleibefuehrerinwien.blogspot.co.at

Thanks to Hansel Sato who invited me to participate.

Utopia of alliances, conditions of impossibilities and the vocabulary of decoloniality. 361 pages, 2010-2013 Editorial Group for Writing Insurgent Genealogies
Löcker Verlag

This book is a reflection of memory politics as well as upon how to make alliances between present forms of anti-racist, anti-colonial, political, theoretical, critical and artistic works. The notion of decoloniality has provided a radical option with which to rethink learning processes coming from positions that are not exclusively Western-orientated but are instead formed by other political-social contexts and perspectives. The concept of decoloniality offers an insurgent position in the history of colonialism and in all it's contemporary forms of colonial subjugation, exploitation and discrimination.

I took the opportunity to have the protest of an inspiring Awajun-Wampi woman published in the book: in the Peruvian Amazon a series of protests against the extraction of oil, wood and gold in protected areas, is counteracted by the State and ends with a hundred civilians injured and the death of what is presented as murdered policemen and deceased natives. While the figure 'exploitation of natural resources – damage to the environment – protest – state repression' is a constant in Peru, the protest of the Amazonian peoples reveals the most salient aspects of the underlying continuities of a colonial system. State representatives refer to the protesters as terrorists who impede the progress of the country, or alternative as good people ("the natives are good") who are just being manipulated by forces who seek to destabilize the government. This denial of the Amazonian subject and/or of the Indigenous subject as a political subject, is questioned by the protest speech of an Awajun-Wampi woman who provides an analysis of the role of the State in her sense of reality. Text.

Thanks to the class of Post Conceptual Art Practices of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in which the book was produced.